Kobo – Showing Series Information

It’s always nice to learn something, even when it is something that you shouldn’t have to learn.

For a while now I have been frustrated how my Kobo only shows series information on some books, but not others. The time it appears to work seems random and unpredictable.

This is annoying when you have dumped 5 books in a series onto your e-reader, and then can’t recall which order to read them. It is impossible when the series you have uploaded (Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels) number 37 in all.

Calibre, the book management system I use, has various ways to also include series information in the title. But (a) it didn’t work with my Kobo – the Kobo persisted in showing just the title as it appears in the ebook, and (b) the books that do show series information did so without me using Calibre’s fancy functions.

I finally found a really simple, but dumb, solution. If you upload a book with series information into a Kobo (at least, the model I have), it doesn’t upload the series information the first time. However, if you subsequently upload the same book a second time, *then* it has the series information.

But it isn’t even as simple as that – it isn’t enough to upload the books to the e-reader twice in succession. You have to upload the books once, then unplug the Kobo from the computer, to allow the e-reader to catalogue, then plug it back in and upload the books again. Then they show correctly with their series information, as they should.